Life Discovery: The “Problem — Solution” Challenge and Response

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17 min readFeb 25, 2022

Some thinking tools for Life Strategy

Last Sept, I made “Anticipatory Activity System” as a by-product of the D as Diagramming project which aims to explore the value of diagrams for turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.

I used the “Diagramming as Thinking” method to deal with my tacit knowledge such as startup, strategy, business, etc. I claimed that the notion of “Anticipatory Activity System” is a rough idea, not a formal proposal.

In fact, I don’t know how to deliver a formal proposal about it. This month, I started writing some articles about it. Eventually, I started developing the Anticipatory Activity System Framework in order to develop the Life Discovery Activity.

This article aims to introduce some thinking tools for dealing with the “Problem — Solution” challenge and response.

1. The Browser — Extension Metaphor

I use the “Browser — Extension” metaphor to develop the Anticipatory Activity System Framework and curate my writing activity.

The Browser Section: discuss the core concept of the framework.
The Extension Section: introduce third-party frameworks for Life Discovery Activity.

The Browser section aims to develop a theoretical foundation for the Anticipatory Activity System Framework. I use a simple strategy to conduct this task: I consider the following diagram as the basic model of the framework and I only consider the concepts on the diagram as primary concepts for the framework. Other related concepts are considered secondary concepts.

The above diagram highlights the following primary concepts:

Anticipation
Activity
System
Self — Other
Present — Future
Object — Objective
Result — Reward
First-order Activity — Second-order Activity

The following articles belong to the Browser Section. Since the framework is inspired by Activity Theory and Anticipatory System theory. I have to offer the necessary background about some theoretical concepts and my conceptualizations for the new framework.

The Extension Section introduces some third-party frameworks for Life Discovery Activity. As an application of the Anticipatory Activity System Framework, the Life Discovery Activity offers a landscape view for acting with the framework in the real-life world. You can find related articles from the list below:

[Feb 20] Life Discovery: The “Present — Future” Fit and The ECHO Way

Moreover, I am also working on an empirical research project about the SSL (Shaper & Supporter Lab) program which is an adult life development program. I will also share what I learned from the SSL program.

2. The “Problem—Solution” Challenge

The Life Discovery Activity focuses on 1) Detecting Potential Contradictions and 2) Exploring Potential Themes in order to enhance a person’s life development. In order to cope with potential contradictions, we need to adopt objects as Means for solving problems. In order to develop potential themes, we need to adopt objects as End as creative spaces.

Today I am going to talk about Detecting Potential Contradictions with the “Problem — Solution” challenge metaphor.

The term “Contradictions” is adopted from Activity Theory while the “Problem — Solution” challenge is a common metaphor in the field of design, strategy, and management.

The rest of the article will introduce some relevant thinking tools for Life Discovery Activity.

3. The Alford-Head Typology

The common sense of the problem-solving process starts with defining the problem. This is also a great starting point for the Life Discovery Activity.

Inspired by Edward Morrison’s dissertation Strategic Doing: A Strategy Model for Open Networks (2021), I found that Alford and Head (2017)’s model about wicked problems is pretty relevant to the Life Discovery Activity.

According to Edward Morrison, “Alford and Head (2017) suggest we pause and distinguish among different types of wicked problems because the scholarship has become a bit confusing. They have come up with an approach to help us see through the thicket. Wicked problems fall along two dimensions: the increasing complexity of the problem and the expanding engagement of participants in generating solutions to these problems. Using Alford and Head’s insights, Figure 1-2 explains where this research is situated. The action research projects in this thesis reflect situations in which both the problems and the collaborations are complex.” (2021, p.7–8)

Edward Morrison places the Strategic Doing model in the red area on the above large matrix. The Strategic Doming model is based on action research, Edward Morrison emphasizes that “The fundamental challenge in developing solutions to wicked problems involves transferring and integrating knowledge across multiple participants (Weber & Khademian, 2008). In other words, as Schön predicted, to address these wicked problems, we need to design and develop organizations and institutions that learn and adapt. These organizations and institutions can bring about their continuing transformation in the face of growing challenges to their stability (Schön, 1971: 30). Both the ‘end of the stable state’ and the emergence of ‘wicked problems’ describe our human encounter with dynamic, open systems. Scholars also refer to these systems as ‘complex adaptive systems’ (Holland, 1992). These systems are composed of connected, interacting, and diverse entities. Originating in the natural sciences, the concept of complex adaptive systems in the social sciences tends to focus on emergence: the idea that social interactions among individuals give rise to larger patterns (Levin, 2003).”

Though the Strategic Doing model focuses on guiding local ecosystem builders to solve problems of open collaboration in order to support local sustainable development, it is also useful for the Life Discovery Activity.

The Life Discovery Activity is also about solving wicked problems, but its target users are individuals. The activity also requires designing and developing individuals that learn and adapt. These individuals can bring about their continuing transformation in the face of growing challenges to their stability.

The major difference between Open Network Innovation and Life Discovery Activity is the complexity of social relationships. The Life Discovery Activity focuses on individuals and its social relationship is modeled with the “Self—Other” Relevance.

I adopt Alford and Head’s matrix to define the knowledge niche of the Life Discovery Activity. It’s clear that it doesn’t want to deal with low-complexity of problems (such as tame problems, communicatively complex problems, and politically complex problems) and multiple stakeholders (such as politically complex problems, politically turbulent problems, and very wicked problems).

The blue area contains four types of problems for the Life Discovery Activity:

Analytically complex problem
Cognitively complex problem
Complex problem
Conceptually contentious problem

From the perspective of the Anticipatory Activity System Framework, this mini matrix can be understood with the following two dimensions:

The Hierarchy of Life Experience: It defines the complexity of cognitive content of problems.
The Self—Other Relevance: It defines the complexity of social context of problems.

I have adopted a typology of the Self — Other Relevance for the Anticipatory Activity System Framework in previous articles (1, 2). I will discuss the Hierarchy of Life Experience later.

4. The Strategist’s Mandala Plus

The Alford-Head Typology is about defining categories of problems. Now we need to talk about a particular problem. I’d like to introduce the Strategist’s Mandala Plus as an example.

On Jan 1, 2022, I designed the diagram below for fun. It’s part of the Mandala Project which aims to design a series of diagrams with the same meta-diagram called Hubhood. You can find more details from the original article: The Mandala Plus Diagram.

The Strategist’s Mandala was formed by four thematic spaces:

The “Problem” thematic space
The “Solution” thematic space
The “Resource” thematic space
The “Opportunity” thematic space

A thematic space is a larger cognitive container that contains a person’s life experience and tacit knowledge about a particular theme and what he learned from books, videos, papers, articles, and other public knowledge resources.

The above Mandala only represents my own understanding of the above four themes. For each theme, I list some sub-themes. For the “Problem” thematic space, I select the following sub-themes:

Impact: What’s the impact of this problem?
Source: Where does this problem come from?
Tendency: How will this problem evolve next?
Structure: What’s the internal structure of this problem?

For the “Solution” thematic space, I select the following sub-themes:

Anticipation: What kind of solution do you want?
Performance: Do you have the skills and resources to implement this solution?
Exploration: Do you want to find solutions by yourself in order to explore and learn?
Exploitation: Do you want to solve the problem as soon as possible?

The above sub-themes are just examples. We can play the diagram with other sub-themes as many as we want.

As mentioned above, the Life Discovery Activity requires designing and developing individuals that learn and adapt. These individuals can bring about their continuing transformation in the face of growing challenges to their stability.

The above thematic spaces and sub-themes are great objects for individuals to learn and adapt. It is a mediating instrument for the communication between Life Discovery Coaches and Life Discovery Clients. It’s also a framework for individuals to develop their own minds.

5. Where is the Problem?

One of the above sub-themes about Life Discovery Activity is the source of problems. Where does this problem come from?

Let’s have a look at an answer from the Activity Theorist Clay Spinuzzi’s 2013 book Topsight: A guide to studying, diagnosing, and fixing information flow in organizations. The book is about a methodology for researching work activities with Activity Theory.

The above chart is the summary of analytical models for Topsight. Based on the three-level hierarchy of Activity Theory, Topsight suggests the following three levels of activity:

Macro (organization) level: culture and history; objectives and outcomes.
Meso (human) level: actions and goals.
Micro (habit) level: habits and reactions.

In fact, there are two models at the Macro level: Activity Systems and Activity Networks. Since the basic unit of Activity Networks is an Activity System, we can also consider it as a four-level hierarchy.

For Topsight, the most important theme is Understanding Disruptions. According to Clay Spinuzzi, “If you’ve carefully collected data, you can find patterns to people’s work, including patterns in their mistakes and difficulties. That’s because work is generally set up in cycles and managed with relatively stable information resources and work patterns. Because that’s the case, even mistakes and difficulties tend to cluster around specific parts of the work. Let’s call those mistakes disruptions. Disruptions happen at different levels: macro, meso, and micro levels.” (2013, p.165–166)

Each level has its own type of disruptions:

Micro level: Breakdowns
Meso level: Discoordinations
Macro level: Contradictions

This hierarchy is awesome! Since we have a model of the hierarchy of activity, we can assign problems to different levels which require different solutions.

However, the hierarchy of activity is about social work collaboration. It is not a hierarchy of life. For the Life Discovery Activity, we need a model to understand life problems in general.

6. What’s the Problem?

The lifestorian Bruce Feiler conducted a life narrative study project which collected hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changes. In 2020, he published a book titled Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering change at any age.

Bruce Feiler uses Disruptors to describe major life change events, “A disruptor is an event or experience that interrupts the everyday flow of one’s life. I chose disruptors as opposed to stressors, crises, problems, or any other label they’ve been given over the years because the term is more value neutral. Many disruptors, like adopting a child, say, or starting a new job, would not traditionally be defined as negative, yet they’re still disruptive. Even the most customarily negative life events, like losing a spouse or being fired, sometimes become catalysts for reinvention. Disruptors are simply deviations from daily life.” (2020, p.52)

I agree with Bruce Feiler on selecting a value neutral term for life change and life discovery. In a general sense, any new change always leads to a challenge for a person and it can be considered a problem.

From 225 life stories, Bruce Feiler discovers a typology of life change events. The total number of disruptors was fifty-two. He also divided the list into five categories: Love, Identity, Beliefs, Work, and Body. See the following picture.

To be honest, I think this typology is not a perfect one. If I can access the 225 life stories, I might develop a different typology. Anyway, the above Deck of Disruptors gives us a list of major life change events in the 21st century.

This is very useful for the Life Discovery Activity project. It’s a great reference.

7. What if a Problem Is Not a Problem?

Bruce Feiler’s term disruptors remind me to think about the term Dramatic Experiences which is used for developing the Drama-fit framework.

On Jan 8, 2022, I had a call with Helen Li who is the founder of Dominos Philanthropy Academy. The primary theme of the conversation is about applying theories to youth charity education and youth development in general.

As a pioneer of youth charity education in China, Helen was busy developing a brand new social practice from scratch. We spent about 39 minutes discussing the long-term activity of finding the purpose of life in the context of youth charity education. The main purpose of the discussion was to find some connections between some psychological theories and youth development and the education of life meaning.

I adopted Activity Theory, Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, Self-Determination Theory (SDT), and Ecological Psychology for our discussion. One idea I mentioned is Lev Vygotsky’s Dramatic Experiences.

As Vygotsky emphasized, “The basic principle of the functioning of higher functions (personality) is social, entailing interaction of functions, in place of interaction between people. They can be most fully developed in the form of drama” (Vygotsky 1929/1989, p. 59). According to Nikolai Veresov, “The dramatic frame of the personality as the unique organization and hierarchy of mental functions is the result of unique dramatic inter-psychological collisions that have happened in the life of the human being and their overcoming by a human being, the intra-psychological result of the individual’s unique developmental trajectory. Therefore, the psychology must be developed in the concepts of drama, not in the concepts of processes’ (Vygotsky,1929/1989 p. 71). Overcoming social dramatical collisions (dramas of life) the human being creates his/her unique personality.” (2014)

The notion of “Dramatic Development” is a fantastic idea. Nikolai Veresov also points out, “The drama of the personality as a participant in the drama of life is the essential contradiction and the moving force for development. Thus, the intra-psychological consists of internalized dramatic social interactions: ‘the dynamic of the personality is drama’ (Vygotsky, 1929/1989 p. 67). Here an abstract dialectical idea of a contradiction as a moving force of development obtains its concrete psychological content in the concept of the drama of life as a moving force in the development of human personality. This introduces a theoretical perspective of rethinking human psychology in terms of drama.” (2014)

After the meeting, I adopted the ECHO Way meta-diagram and designed a new diagram called Drama-fit.

I used the U shape to summarize key clues within our conversation. For example, the Left side is Supportive Environments which highlights three types of environments:

Network of Communities
Proximal Context
Mediating Tools

The right side is Dramatic Experiences which is inspired by Career APIs, a heuristic tool I made several years ago:

A: Agenda of Times
P: Problems of Domain
I: Personal Issues

I have introduced the Career APIs diagram in a previous article. The diagram is made with the Tripartness meta-diagram. The A (Agenda of the Times) is located in the “Organization — Community” zone, the P (Problems of Domain) is located in the “Person — Community” zone, and the I (Personal Issues) is located in the “Person — Organization” zone.

The above diagram used my own experience of searching “Google Wifi” on the App Store. You can find more details in the original article. The purpose of the Career APIs is that we can detach from a cognitive domain and attach it to another cognitive domain.

Is a dramatic experience a problem? It depends on each person’s situation and attitude.

8. How to Deal with Problems?

According to the Activity Theorist Frederick van Amstel, there are two ways of dealing with problems:

The Reduction technique
The Expansion technique

In traditional design theories, the reduction technique breaks down problems into sub-problems. Then, find a solution for each sub-problem. Finally, find an over solution that integrates all sub-solutions into a coherent whole.

The Expansion technique takes a different path that embraces the wholeness.

It is similar to the idea of holism. In particular, the expansion technique takes the following steps:

Departing from the assumption that they do not know the whole
Identifying the parts as they are, not as they should be in an ideal way, even if that is very chaotic
Looking at the interrelationships between the parts
Expanding the understanding of the whole based on the understanding of the relationships
Creating new relationships between the parts and the parts and the whole

Can we apply the Expansion technique to the Life Discovery Activity? You can find an example from my real life, see this post on Linkedin.

9. Challenge as Opportunity

Finally, I’d like to introduce the “Challenge — Response” module from the Life Curation framework for the present discussion.

In Dec 2019, I had a discussion with a friend about her career development. In order to share my insights from the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach and Curativity Theory, I made a document titled Life Curation.

One part of the Life Curation framework is the “Challenge — Response” module. By curating some theories, I identified three types of challenges. See the diagram below.

The Existing Challenges are about keeping life balance. I adopted Ellen Skinner and Kathleen Edge’s motivational model of Context, Self, Action, and Outcomes (2002) as a resource.

I defined the Positive Existing Challenges as the actions which respond to aggressive tasks while the Negative Existing Challenges as the actions which respond to defensive tasks. The Positive Existing Challenges refer to Engagement which is a concept of Skinner and Edge’s model. The Negative Existing Challenges refer to Coping.

The concept of Incongruity is the core of an action theoretical approach which was developed by Matthias Rauterberg in 1999. According to Rauterberg, the difference between the complexity of the mental model (MC) and the complexity of the external context (EC) is called incongruity: IC = EC -MC. There are two types of incongruity: Positive Incongruity and Negative Incongruity. For Rauterberg, only positive incongruity leads to learning.

Based on the approach, I defined two types of Learning Challenges. The Positive Challenges refer to actions that respond to positive incongruity (understanding the complexity of the situation) while the Negative Challenges refer to actions that respond to negative incongruity (transforming the complexity of ability). Based on my own experience, I thought the negative incongruity could lead to learning too. However, it refers to transforming the complexity of ability. For example, an expert faces a negative incongruity if the complexity of a situation is lower than the complexity of his mental model. However, if he wants to teach others how to cope with the same type of situation, he needs to learn communicative skills in order to reduce the complexity of the ability for others to learn. My suggestion expanded Rauterberg’s model from an individual perspective to an interpersonal perspective.

The Possible challenges are inspired by Hazel Rose Markus’ Possible Selves Theory (1986). The Positive Possible Challenges refer to actions responding to positive selves (like-to-be selves). The Negative Possible Challenges refer to actions responding to negative selves (like-to-avoid selves).

Now, let’s apply this framework to my decisions in 2018. You can find more details in the original article Challenge as Opportunity.

First, let’s have look at the two options:

Building a community of inquiry about Epistemic Development
Keep on the journey of personal intellectual discovery

Both the above two options are not Negative Existing Challenges because they are not things given to me by others. They are not Positive Existing Challenges too because they are not related to my daily life work. Both options are Positive Possible Challenges because they refer to like-to-be selves. However, I chose one possible self from these two options. I rejected challenge 1 because I knew an expert in community building is my past self. I accepted challenge 2 because I wanted to be an expert in theory-based reflection.

Second, let’s review the process of writing the book Curativity:

Apply Activity Theory to general curation practice.
Develop an ecological approach and apply it to general curation practice.

Both challenges are Learning Challenges. For this case, the external context refers to general curation practice while the mental model refers to my understanding of theoretical approaches. There is no incongruity for challenge 1 because I knew both sides. That was the reason that I thought challenge 1 was not enough for me. Challenge 2 is a Positive Learning Challenge because there was a positive incongruity. I didn’t have a clear mental model of the ecological approach. Thus, the complexity of the mental model is lower than the complexity of the external context. This led to learning.

Also, both challenges can be considered as Positive Possible Challenges. Challenge 1 could lead to the developmental direction of becoming an expert in Activity Theory while challenge 2 refers to the direction of the ecological approach. Since Activity Theory is an established theoretical tradition, I chose the ecological approach because there are no established frameworks and that meant a creative space. This is a radical exploratory strategy.

However, I returned to Activity Theory and worked on the Activity U project in 2020.

Why?

Because I wanted to make a balance between exploration and exploitation.

Also, I realized that the complexity of my mental model in 2020 was higher than it was in 2018. Thus, I found that my understanding of Activity Theory was not deep enough. I needed to re-explore it.

10. The Challenge — Response Strategy

The above discussion introduces various thinking tools for thinking about the “Problem — Solution” challenge. In a broad sense, we can understand the pair of concepts “Problem — Solution” as the pair of concepts “Challenge — Response”.

For the Life Discovery Activity, the above three types of challenges connect the Real Self and Possible Selves.

For the Anticipatory Activity System framework, the above three types of challenges connect the Present and the Future. It is a useful module for considering Second-order Activity.

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